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January 2007

Quote: With the Web, we could be witnessing the most
important development in expressive media since the advent of writing.
One exciting if disruptive possibility is that under the influence of
the young, the Internet will usher in a new era of interactive,
audiovisual literacy. Though written words will remain critical to
human communication, it’s likely they will no longer dominate in the
exchange of news and information. –Jon Palfreman, 2006 Nieman Fellow

Note: I really like that phrase…interactive literacy. In this world, when we consume, we create. And while we may feel discomfort at the idea that written words may no longer dominate our communication, right now, it’s just different, not necessarily worse.

Quote: Journalism is on a fast-paced, transformative journey, its destination still unknown. That the Web and other media technologies are affecting mightily the practice of journalism is beyond dispute. Less clear is any shared vision of what the future holds.Note: Hmmm…sounds like some other institution I know. This Nieman Reports issue has an amazing array of essays that articulate the changes that are occuring in journalism and media. My favorite section is “Sensing the Change,” and there will be more to say about these ideas… - post by willrich

So this harkens back to the “butterfly” post from a couple of days ago and hopefully extends the thinking even further in terms of what happens when we read online and how blogging plays a role in developing a sophistication in reading interactions. And, of course, what this all means for our kids.

There’s no doubt that my own reading skills and habits have changed drastically since I started consuming so much more online content. And the biggest difference is that I am more of an active reader online than when reading in print. And for me, the biggest reason my reading has changed is because of blogging. I now read with an intent to write, and my writing (or blogging) is an attempt to synthesize and connect ideas, not simply summarize or paraphrase what I’ve been reading (if I even get to that.) I have many memories when I was teaching my Honors Expository Comp kids of their frustrations not with the writing…they all could do that pretty well…but the reading and the connecting. They found it so hard to take information from disparate sources and connect them some way into a coherent few paragraphs. And I would argue it was because, like so many other things we ask them to do in school, it was a contrived exercise. Pick a topic (abortion) create a thesis (keep it legal), find support, blah, blah, blah.

In this bloggy world, however, if you’re reading and writing regularly about something that you are truly passionate about, that synthesis becomes almost second nature. You are always making connections and writing your own narrative, as McNabb says:

…reading online requires synthesis of multiple perspectives and multiple information resources. We have to create our own narrative. And in a book the author creates a narrative for us and connects information and synthesizes through explanation. And we do that in our heads now when we are reading online.

But are our students doing that, and are our teachers helping them do that? They should, because hypertext offers a different structure that changes the reading process.

It changes the reading path. And the kinds of things that we do when we are reading hypertext are different from when we read a narrative print. And as a result, some students may encounter that it requires more mental energy to focus on creating a personal rhetorical structure while they are reading. It requires engagement in critical analysis of information.

And it also requires that teachers be able to assess their online reading skills differently from offline. And one suggestion she has is to use blogs not only as reflective writing spaces that support those critical reading skills but also as metoring spaces for watching it happen:

…you could sign up parents or reading tutors from the community to come in and blog with kids on more of an individualized basis or small group so that there is that feedback and monitoring of asking kids comprehension questions and seeing if they are really comprehending. And having somebody read the same thing the kids are reading to make sure that kids are actually understanding.

So here’s the deal:

FACT: Students are and will be doing more reading in hypertext environments.FACT: Reading in hypertext environments requires different literacies than in print environments.FACT: Teachers need to teach their students how to read effectively in hypertext environments.FACT: In order to teach these literacies effectively, teachers must also model their use.CONCLUSION: Teachers should be reading and writing online (blogging).

Quote: Most teens check their email a lot less frequently
than they do their MySpace email, instant messages or text messages.
AT&T Cingular or whatever they are calling themselves now has
launched an effort to get parents texting. Of course this helps their
bottom line, but I also think texting your teen is a great way to
communicate. And since most parents have cell phones, it’s pretty
convenient.

Note: Just make sure she’s not riding her horse at the time… - post by willrich

Daniel Pink has it right about design being an important literacy in a world where we are able to publish so easily. To that end, I’ve been noticing that a lot of us, myself included, have been putting more and more photos and graphics in our posts. Many of us are also reading Kathy Sierra’s blog which always offers up some compelling graphics, ones, however, that seem a bit out of reach for my scarcely artistic brain.

So I need things like Thumbscrew (MAC only) which lets me take a picture, like this one of Tess, and in about a nanosecond give it just a bit of a twist to make it all artsy and stuff and, hopefully, enhance the design of this blog. (Watch out…that’s my kid.)

Now I know there is a danger of over-design here. (I know I’m on the verge of getting over-widgeted.) And I also know that many times vanilla is better than a whole bunch of flavors mashed together. Good thing my wife is a designer and has promised to kick me in the right brain if I get out of hand…

Not sure why it took me so long to finally dive into Library Thing but, despite the imminent demise of books as we know them (smile) I got hooked in maybe 27 seconds. In fact, I might say that I found LT to be among (if not the) most intuitive, easy to use, fantastically fast interface of any social site I’ve seen yet.

Basically, Library Thing allows you to easily catalog all of the books in your personal library which, in turn, leads to all sorts of social goodness. I can easily find out who else is reading the books I have, see what’s in their libraries, and start conversations with them about what they are reading and recommending. Of course, I can tag the books in my collection, rate them, write a review, add comments to the listing, and access all of the Library of Congress information about the book in an instant. (They just added their 9 millionth book to their database.) There are widgets to add (scroll down and see mine in the right hand column) and it has a great zeitgeist page that gives an overview of all things…um…Library Things. (For instance, the largest collection is 14, 954 books…whoa!)

Obviously, this is a great way to not only track what you’re reading but find other stuff to read (although one look at the stack of books next to my bed and I wonder if that’s a good thing or a bad thing.) But I also thing it’s a wonderful example of the social potential of Web 2.0 in a very concrete way. I mean del.icio.us is a powerful tool, but I’m not sure how many people really “get it” without some bit of brainwork. This is easy and obvious, and let’s face it, everyone has a library…right?

Quote: “Mobile University provides a standardized, one-on-one device that mirrors the ThinkPad program and all manner of campus services,” said Crouch. “This pilot gives us a chance to work through the logistics.” It’s likely students don’t mind being the guinea pigs in the process, Swofford said. “This is not a luxury device; it’s their whole life.”

Note: Interesting article on Wake Forest’s pilot of smart phones with their students. It’s all about access to information, interaction with peers and teachers, and connecting to a larger community. (via Dean Shareski)

Now I know on many levels I’m not normal, but there are moments in the blogging process that just give me butterflies. Many of them occur serendipitously when I’m reading and two or three pieces of content flow up from my network that begin to click together in my brain like magnets, making connections. And at that moment, my mind starts writing, composing a post that it needs to make sense of the ideas, the patterns that seem to be emerging. I’ve come to rely on the blogging to cement together the pieces and make them more of a whole, one that I know is never fully complete, and never will be. And that’s when the butterflies come, in that moment of recognition, when things seem to make more sense. They tell me some molecules have moved, that I think I know something that I didn’t before. It’s what keeps me doing this.

Obviously, that happened just now as I was wallowing in my Google Reader (having left Bloglines far behind), reading post after post that made my brain hum with thought. But what clicked were a couple of items that just led so seamlessly one into another as I pulled them up.

Here’s an example of how it might work, imagine the institute’s Iraq Study Group Report in 3D. Main authors would have nodes or “homesites” close to the book with threads connecting them to sections they authored. Co-authors/commentors might have thinner threads that extend out to their, more remotely located, sites. The 3D depiction would allow readers to see “threads” that extend out from each author to everything they have created in digital space. In other words, their entire network would be made visible. Readers could know an author’s body of work in a new way and they could begin to see how collaborative works have been understood and shaped by each contributor. It would be ultimate transparency. It would be absolutely fascinating to see a 3D visualization of other works and deeds by the Iraq Study Groups’ authors, and to “see” the interwoven network spun by Washington’s policy authors. Readers could zoom out to get a sense of each author’s connections. Imagine being able to follow various threads into territories you never would have found via other, more conventional routes.

Now that would be an amazing capacity, to follow the connections and gain all sorts of context as to the authors and the ideas and their evolution. And it would demand reading skills that revolve around following connections and vetting sources in ways that would challenge our current pedagogies. Talk about active reading…

In that same vein, I’ve been spending some time clicking around Daylife, which is a newish news puller-together that looks to contextualize what’s happening in the world and connect the events to the people and the history around it. It’s not the 3-D world that Kim describes, but as I read David Weinberger’s post this morning it was clear that it’s a step in the right direction. The individual topic pages (like this one on Condoleezza Rice) are full of content…pictures, articles, people who are connected in some way, quotes, Wikipedia entries, etc. It gives the opportunity to drill further down into the information in ways that newspapers can’t. Now I know this is new, and it has a ways to go in terms of building up resources, etc. But it’s the direction I find interesting.

And it leads me to a better understanding of one of my favorite excerpts from one of my favorite articles about all of this, “Scan This Book” by Kevin Kelly:

Yet the common vision of the library’s future (even the e-book future) assumes that books will remain isolated items, independent from one another, just as they are on shelves in your public library. There, each book is pretty much unaware of the ones next to it. When an author completes a work, it is fixed and finished. Its only movement comes when a reader picks it up to animate it with his or her imagination. In this vision, the main advantage of the coming digital library is portability â€” the nifty translation of a book’s full text into bits, which permits it to be read on a screen anywhere. But this vision misses the chief revolution birthed by scanning books: in the universal library, no book will be an island.

Turning inked letters into electronic dots that can be read on a screen is simply the first essential step in creating this new library. The real magic will come in the second act, as each word in each book is cross-linked, clustered, cited, extracted, indexed, analyzed, annotated, remixed, reassembled and woven deeper into the culture than ever before. In the new world of books, every bit informs another; every page reads all the other pages.

Which is another vision that gives me butterflies.

In his TED presentation, Jeff Han said:

I kind of cringe at the idea that we’re going to introduce a whole new generation of people to computing with the standard mouse and Windows pointer interface. This is the way we should be interacting with machines from this point on…There’s no reason in this day and age why we should be conforming to a physical device. They should conform to us.

My question is how fast is all of this going to reach our kids…and what does it mean for our curriculum right now. These literacies aren’t necessarily new, but they are much more complex. Our younger kids, my kids, are going to need to have them. I don’t think, right now at least, most schools have much of a clue as to how to address them.

Quote: “Following continuing pressure from politicians (and parts of the media), MySpace is planning to offer parents the chance to download software which will monitor aspects of their children’s activities on the social networking site.”

Quote: New Jersey needs a television station to call its own. Programmed by New Jerseyans, for New Jerseyans. TVJersey has no broadcast towers, no satellites. It doesnâ€™t even have a studio. But it has you. And what you produce, weâ€™ll promote.

Quote: “Google isn’t a search engine. Google is a reputation-managment system. What do we search for, anyway? Mostly people, products, ideas — and what we want to know are, what do other people think about this stuff? All this blogging, Flickring, MySpacing, journaling — and, most of all, linking — has transformed the Internet into a world where it’s incredibly easy to figure out what the world thinks about you, your neighbor, the company you work for, or the stuff you were blabbing about four years ago. It might seem paradoxical, but in a situation like that, it’s better to be an active participant in the ongoing conversation than to stand off and refuse to participate. Because, okay, let’s say you don’t want to blog, or to Flickr, or to participate in online discussion threads. That means the next time someone Googles you they’ll find … everything that everyone else has said about you, rather than the stuff you’ve said yourself. (Again — just ask Sony about this one.) The only way to improve andd buff your reputation is to dive in and participate. Be open. Be generous. Throw stuff out there — your thoughts, your ideas, your personality. Trust comes from transparency.” –Clive ThompsonNote: This whole idea of private/public, open/closed is what is really hard for most educators to get their brains around. (via Clarence Fisher)

Quote: I believe that professionals immersed in communities of practice or continuously pushing their informal learning opportunities can have a larger zone of proximal development. They are more open to learning and to expanding their knowledge. I have had a huge growth in my professional network since I started blogging. These professional conversations are not possible off-line when you live outside a major urban centre, as I do. Today, active involvement in informal learning, particularly through web-based communities, is key to remaining professional and creative in a field. –Harold Jarche

Note: I wonder if these conversations are even possible in urban centres. The thing I find so much more effective about the network learning I do is that itâ€™s asynchronous and done on my time. And yet IM and Skype and others make synchronous discussion imminently possible when needed or necessary. And all of that is what to me at least poses such a challenge to the traditional work of classroooms where we are all expected to learn the same things at the same time.

Quote: At Footnote.com you will find millions of images of original source
documents, many of which have never been available online before.

But at Footnote, finding an image is just the beginning. We have created powerful tools that let you interact with and
enhance what you find. Annotate important information on the image,
easily organize and share your findings or collaborate with people who
have similar interests. If you have original source images of your own that you want to
share with your colleagues, classmates, friends and family, simply
upload them to Footnote and use our tools to make your images
searchable and available to others.

Note: This could be an amazing project for students to take on, studying and annotating historical documents…4.5 million of them at present. But what I reeally like is that there is an opportunity to contribute as well. Reminds me on some level of the “Scan This Book” article by Kevin Kelly from last year.

Well, not really. But if you were thinking about taking part in the Moodle, Drupal, Read/Write Web Workshops that are running in Philadelphia in a couple of weeks, please sign up now. (Here’s the direct link to the two-day sessions I’ll be doing.) Remember, they’re going to be held at the new Science Leadership Academy which is Chris Lehmann‘s new school, so you’ll get a taste of what one iteration of School 2.0 looks like. (There’s also going to be a free and open source software for K-12 schools presentation.) Hope to see you there!

Did I mention I got a TIVO for Christmas? And yeah, it’s great and all that now I can watch the Daily Show and get to see some Frontline type stuff whenever I want it. But to be honest, the whole TIVO think has been a bummer on one level in that I find myself watching more television, which is something I really don’t want to do. I mean, this is the Age of Participation, right? But all TIVO and Sling and Netflix and, to some extent, YouTube (if you’re just watching it) and others seem to be doing is pulling us back to where we were before. The only difference is now we need a new term for couch potato…comp potato? Tech potato, perhaps?

So it’s not surprising, is it, that more and more of us are labeling ourselves procrastinators? 26 percent of Americans, according to a new study, up from 5 percent 20 years ago. And as the article points out, much of it is due to the “distraction” of technology.

“It’s easier to procrastinate now than ever before. We have so many more temptations,” he said. “It’s never been harder to be self-disciplined in all of history than it is now.”

And I admit, I struggle with this too. (You should see my honey-do list.) I’d like to think it’s because I’ve got more productive things to do (like blog and write) and that the reason I’m procrastinating on cleaning up the backyard is not really procrastination at all…it’s choices.

But, as usual, I wonder about my kids and our students. I mean, let’s face it, the “distractions” are becoming more ubiquitous. The other day I was up at the farm watching my daughter ride her pony, and also in the ring was an older girl who was atop her horse, walking slowly, all the time texting messages into her cell phone. I found that to be a pretty unsettling sight. I mean, the whole zen of participation takes on a totally different meaning in that respect.

I want my kids to create, to interact. I don’t want them watching television, of which 99% is absolutely, insanely stupid, demeaning, manipulative and inconsequential. I want them to make television of a different ilk, one that makes asks them and their audience to engage and think. I thought we were heading more in that direction, but I feels like we’re headed for a retreat.

Quote: MIT Center for Marketing Research: “As one of, if not the, first studies of social media adoption with statistical significance, this research proves conclusively that social media is coming to the business world and sooner than many anticipated.”

Note: See previous entry re: IBM. This study surveyed over 140 Inc 500 companies. Even more to chew on regarding why we need to teach this, even though the executive summary is pretty thin and the adoption rates (11% for wikis, for example) are still very small. - post by willrich

Quote: Here’s what you need to know if your boss hands you a camera and tells you to do a video story… –Chuck Fadley

Note: Might be of use for those of you here in the Garden State who are thinking of contributing to TV Jersey. Just put a video up on YouTube with the tag “tvjersey” and it will be pulled onto the page automatically. Wonderful stuff.

Quote: “This is where the rubber meets the road for citizen journalism — where people who have something important to say finally get a platform, a channel, in which to publish and broadcast.” –Mindy McAdams

Note: I’ve been thinking lately, wouldn’t it be a good idea in this environment to just teach all of our kids to be journalists?

Great quote in a story about being a New York Times reporter/blogger:â€œWe are living through the largest expansion of expressive capability
in the history of the human race,â€ said Clay Shirky, an adjunct
professor in the graduate interactive telecommunications program at New York University.
â€œAnd it wouldnâ€™t be a revolution if there were no losers. The speed of
conversation is a part of what is good about it, but then some of the
reflectiveness, the ability for careful summation and expression, is
lost.â€

For a variety of reasons, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about blogging as an act, my love of it, my frustration with it, my history with it. In that spirit, today my brain wandered a bit, trying to reconstruct how exactly I came to blogging, what my first post was, and what the impetus was behind this amazing relationship I’ve had with it. I’d thrown some time at this before, searching through my Blogger archives, the Wayback machine, trying to find the very first words I blogged, but with no success. But today, I had one of those “doh” moments, realized it had been there right in front of my face all along, and finally found it.

So, just so I get the chronology down, I hope you’ll indulge me in a little personal blogging history. (Or not, of course…) Piecing it together now, I find hugely interesting the process I worked through in my own practice with all of this.

So, yeah, June 11, 2001 it starts. Taken out of context, those first words give this whole story a more romantic (if it could be that) feel than it deserves. It turns out the first blog I created was in the “Nerdy Books Journal” which I started during the year I took off from school to help Wendy launch her books. I kept work notes and links as we tried to market and make connections. As it turned out, when I went back to school that fall, the blog pretty much died.

Exactly a month later I started the School Stuff blog which was basically just a personal link/notes blog that I kept up for about six months. Then, on October 23, 2001, I started my first class blog for my Beginning Journalism kids:

Welcome to the journalism blog!

I’ve set this up as a place where you can come if you need to find information about class, about journalism, and about the world. I’ll be posting homework information here regularly; you can find it at the top of the left hand column. I’ll also be posting links, and from time to time I might just throw out some of my own feelings about stuff that’s going on.

You can post here too if you like. Just let me know if you would like to get access. Your names will get posted with each entry, and I have administrative control over content. It would be another way you could contribute to our understanding of journalism and to show effort on your part. Let me know if you want to give it a try.

I’ll be updating this a lot in the next few days, and you guys are going to be my guinea pigs for some other stuff over the next couple of weeks. I know you’re happy. Bear with me, okay?If you want to set up your own Blog, (I love Blogs!) I’ll be happy to help.

I love how tentative that sounds now, looking back. In all honesty, it makes me nostalgic as all get out, that experimentation phase, not knowing exactly what I was doing or where it was going to go. It’s what I miss most about being in the classroom, without question.

On November 13 of 2001, I started a class portal blog for my Web Pages and Portfolios class.

Please bookmark this spot as it will be the place where you can check for updates on assignments, links to cool sites and information about page creation and design, and links to your own personal weblogs.

Scanning the posts, I remembered that I had them set up their own blogs at Diaryland (which, I’m amazed to say, is still in existence.) They were the first of my students to have blogs.

About a month later, my first really personal blog was born, and I do mean personal. In fact, I’d forgotten just how personal some of the posts were at the very beginning. That was back in the day when I never thought anyone was going to be reading anything I wrote anyway, so I figured baring my soul was perfectly ok. (Um, no, not linking to that one.) After I got my first couple of comments, I changed course pretty quickly. That site did eventually turn into Weblogg-ed about a year later.

Then, on January 25, 2002, I started yet another blog, this one for my Journalism 2 students aimed more toward discussion and actually getting kids involved in a learning community online:

Welcome to the Journalism 2 Weblog where we will carry on a conversation about this class and about journalism as a whole. I’m expecting you to get in here and add to the conversation twice a week. That means an average (read: “C” for you grade grubbers) effort on your part would be around 15-20 meaningful posts over the next nine weeks. The more the better. (Remember the word meaningful,however.) A weekly topic will be posted in the left-hand column to get you started, but if you want the big bonus points, post here on your own. Find interesting articles or links that you think the class would be interested in and add them with a bit of comment or question. For a good example of what I’m talking about, see Metafilter. Debate is encouraged, but remember, be civil. I’ll try to enter the conversation too. So have fun with this and use it as a way to push your learning about journalism, the news, and the world around you.

Oooo…the grade thing hurts! But, I have to tell you, reading through some of those early posts from my kids, I can understand why this whole blogging thing bit me so hard. I mean seriously, read those very firstthreeposts and you’ll see what I mean. And as I quickly scanned through some of the 1,057 posts that we accumulated on that blog in those nine weeks (which is amazing in itself) I am floored by the amount of thinking and linking those kids were doing. That was a very uncertain and scary time (as if today isn’t…) and it’s neat to read the kids working through it.

And that was it…I was hooked. I started blogs for my yearbook kids, my softball team, and the next fall I cajoled the technology guys to install Manila on one of our servers. That September we did the Bees, and my classes went paperless. They’re still serving up over 500 sites at my old school…pretty cool.

(Note: Just in case you got this far, I ended up having to re-templatize most of those old blogs today since they were all pointing at old servers which were long gone. Thank goodness Blogger let me push them back over to Blogspot…)

What differentiates this generation are the opportunities to produce as much of their media diet as they consume. The goal for educators should then be to assist students in developing the knowledge, skills, confidence, and ethical structures necessary to participate fully and meaningfully in the changes that result from new media technologies. The challenges include addressing a) the unequal opportunities and knowledge gained from these emerging practices; b) the ethical roles and responsibilities associated with venturing into this new risky and uncharted territory; c) the lack of critical reflection practiced by early adopters of new media; and d) the lack of clear evaluation standards associated with work produced utilizing new media as well as how it relates to previous forms of communication and expression.